Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday January 07, 2011 @04:14PM
from the in-soviet-russia,-lake-uhh-nevermind dept.

Lanxon writes "Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit. The lake, which lies four kilometers below the icy surface of Antarctica, is unique in that it's been completely isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes on the continent for such a long time. It's also oligotropic, meaning that it's supersaturated with oxygen — levels of the element are 50 times higher than those found in most typical freshwater lakes."

Let's assume I made (all of) the obvious joke(s) about "penetrate" so we can get that out of the way.

Finding creatures sealed off for 14 million years below 4km of ice would be pretty cool. I wonder what else is under the Antarctic ice? Was the continent ever tropical/non-icy? Might we find fossils of new species, assuming there was some way to get down there?

Ahhh see... my lovecraft is more than a bit rusty and, I only read a few of the stories anyway. I was actually scouring wikipedia for a reference to a title that I could use for him, but eventually gave up and went with elder god:)

Sorry to burst your bubble, but they will not waken Cthulhu. R'lyeh, as any true Cultist knows, is located at 479S 12643W in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They might get overrun by some Shoggoths down there, but the Sleeper shall not awaken right now. The stars are not right.

Dumb question: Can anyone tell me how they know it contains 50% more oxygen w/o ever having a sample? I know it must be some sort of indirect findings but am curious they could know something like that when it's burried 4km down.

No, it means that the lake has very few nutrients and is therefore not terribly productive biologically. see here [wikipedia.org]. Many lakes that fall into the oligotropic chategory are also Oxygenated but it is not why they are oligotropic.The real question I have is where that Oxygen is coming from. There probably isn't much photosynthesis going on at that depth which means either Oxygen is being imported to the system, it isn't being consumed very rapidly or it's being generated somehow.

Cool to see they have a plan for getting info without causing harm. Hopefully it all works well.

The researchers involved on site have my respect. Here's some info about where they work:
Ave. winter temp: -65C, ave. summer temp: -30C
Altitude: 3488m
Record low temp: -89C. Good thing they are at altitude, as CO2 freezing point is -78C at 1atm.
Polar night for 130 days.

When it is -30C, Russians take their towels and beach umbrellas, drill a hole in the ice and go swimming. [go.com]
When it becomes -65C they cannot find any water in liquid state, so someone came up with this bright idea to drill a hole to an ancient lake, just so they can have a pool in winter.

Well this is a completely uncharted lake with like hitherto unclassified marine life man, so the whole scene's wide open for a scientific exploration. The real hang-up was with the bread man but when the top brass pigs came through we got it together in a couple of moons. Commodore Betty Grable, who's a real sub-aqua head, has got together diving wise and like the whole gig's been a real gas man.

I wonder if Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or some Russian bottling company has thought of trying to acquire the rights to bottle water from the lake. It's Antarctica, so it's legally & technically challenging. But I can imagine quite a market for 14-million year-old bottled water. Seriously!

But I can imagine quite a market for 14-million year-old bottled water contaminated with plastic additives which leaked from the bottle and metals from the tanker who shipped it from the south pole, and detergents from the bottling plant and... Seriously!

I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?

From the article:

Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

What do you think is at the top of the bore? They're sampling the lake but at the top is just a hose that sprays whatever they find into the environment? It takes a long string of implausibly (impossibly?) disastrous outcomes to cause any concern whatsoever.

It takes a long string of implausibly (impossibly?) disastrous outcomes to cause any concern whatsoever.

So was implied about offshore drilling but look at the monumental fuck up that BP was able to pull off in the gulf.

The only people ever to claim that offshore drilling is inherently safe are lobbyists of various types.

Drilling is like sitting on a bomb and hitting it with a hammer all afternoon. Almost certainly nothing bad will happen, but it's pretty obvious that there's a remote chance of disaster, and the nature of the disaster is obvious.

Drilling into a lake in such a way that the borehole will be plugged with the water from that lake several kilometers before reaching the surface, the surface of Antarctica no les

I think the bigger danger is giving a country who ran the most notorious bio weapons labs in history, also known as the Biopreparat [wikipedia.org] access to God knows what that haven't been seen in the environment in 4 million plus years. Hell I wouldn't trust the USA with 4 million years old possible biological weapons, and Putin is even less cuddly than the USA.

I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?

From the article:

Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

So is it going to freeze before it hits the top of the bore then? If not that means we're releasing whatever is in that water into our environment. That could be really really bad any way you look at it.
I'm not hopeful enough that it could release something giving us extreme life-extensions.

So, drilling a hole in the ground and sucking out millions of barrels of hydrocarbons, which have been isolated for thousands (or millions) of years, as well as any organisms living there is fine. Collecting a sample from a lake that has been isolated for thousands of years for research is the beginning of the apocalypse? I can only assume you're quite concerned about the Large Hadron Collider, as well.

I would suggest that anything that can survive the highly oxidizing environment of an oxygen-saturated solvent at -100C in pitch darkness is probably not going to last long in the ion-saturated solar heated environment of the upper atmosphere, even if it were to escape.

But that is presuming that there is sufficient pressure to force fresh water through miles of solid ice at -100C temperatures without freezing anyway, which there probably isn't.

I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?

Any bacteria or other organism that are alive down there have spent the last 14 million years adapting to that environment.

It is a near certainty that they would find our bodies to be a completely inhospitable environment.

The dangerous bacteria are the ones that are adapted to human bodies -- or close enough bodies that it's only a small jump to humans. There are many, many viruses and bacteria that infect mammals but are incapable of reproducing inside our bodies. Antarctic under-ice lake bacteria? No chance.

"Once you pop that bubble so to speak the place will never be the same"

That is true for almost everything we do on this planet whether we like it or not. It's our modus operandi.

"And what's the chance that there's organisms that are harmful to our current ecosystems? " Not a great chance. Harm is never the ultimate goal of microorganisms that are "harmful" to us. Harm is always a byproduct of being able to use us and in order to do that, microorganism must coexist with us for some time.

You mean some schmuck on slashdot didn't discover new problems that elitist scientists, probably played by Oliver Platt, with their Lexuses (Lexi?) and mistresses and ear of the president, up in their ivory tower of Oxford or Yale or Brown didn't think about?

With the supersaturation of the water with O2, I am wondering if much of that O2 will come out of the water when it is breached, most likely destroying the environment down there. I see it kind of like the lakes supersaturated with CO2 in Africa. I didn't see this mentioned at all in the article, just that they expect the water to refreeze.

I think it's unlikely that most of the O2 will come out of solution. They're creating a relatively small-diameter bore into the container of the liquid, and then pulling the drill back out, allowing the pressure inside the container to push water back up into the bore. The water will freeze, resealing the bore, then they'll take a sample of the ice that re-froze in the bore hole to analyze, so nothing 'alien' will be introduced *into* the lake's container.

Would it be impolite to point out that she has accomplished far more in life than you or I have, or probably ever will? If Sarah Palin is dumb, therefore, there's a significantly greater than zero chance that you and I are even dumber.

That is based on the ridiculous notion that intelligence equates to fame. To make this point, I only have two words - "Jersey Shore".

Accomplishments != intelligence. You can be very dumb and very accomplished. It isn't common, but it happens. I don't care what she accomplished or accomplishes, I can tell you with 100% certainty that I am not dumber than she is. I also have little doubt she could not have accomplished anything without a lot of smarter people making decisions for her. I would also like to point out that I still am at my job, and didn't quit halfway through, so I consider myself more accomplished in my employment record.

Is she more famous than 99% of the people on slashdot? Yeah, I'd say so. But more accomplished? I think it would be safe to say that you believe she's accomplished more than you, but I'm not sure if you could say that about everyone. Of course it all depends on what yardstick you're using to measure accomplishment. Is becoming a state governor more or less of an accomplishment than saving a person's life? Is raising a family more or less of an accomplishment than holding one together in poverty? etc... I think you get my point.

As a world famous demagogue she should be having a larger impact on the modern news cycle than any of us. Who knows how long it'll last? *shrug* The mob is a fickle creature, and it's hard to tell if someone is going to become a mainstay or will fade into anonymity in a decade or two.

But as for impact on the world outside the headlines and politics? I don't think she'll be very effective in actually producing change.

The Russians are drilling in Antarctica. Antarctica has lots of ice, so does the North Pole. The North Pole is somewhere in Alaska (at least the magnetic one). From Alaska you can see Russia, and the Russians are drilling in Antarctica.

The Russians are drilling in Antarctica. Palin would like to drill in Alaska. There are concerns about the environmental impact. But the Russians found a safer way of doing it. Palin is against safer ways of doing it. But the Russians would like to penetrate Lake Vostok. So the Russians are drilling in Antarctica.

The Russians are drilling in Antarctica. Russia borders the Arctic. The Arctic has Polar bears, but the Russians went to the pole with the penguins. Penguins represent Linux. Linux is communism. And communism is what the Russians do. No wonder, the Russians are drilling in Antarctica.

His approval ratings are higher than Bush or Carter, he has had more victories for his agenda than most presidents in the first two years, has an astoundingly high approval rating OUTSIDE of the US, certainly higher than Bush and even Reagan during his first two years.

While the health care thing is probably a non-ideal solution, it is apparently too painful for republicans to realize that it was an almost exact copy of the bill originally drafted by Bob Dole and rejected by democrats for being "too conservative". Frankly, it sounds like partisan hackery or talking-point-itis to claim he's the most incompetent president on record.

So what *are* the ramifications of releasing a large pocket of oxygen into our current atmosphere, both for us and for the lake which has been sitting isolated for 14 million years?

Your fears are unfounded, from the article:

Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

So they're taking the appropriate precautions there...

Not so much being snarky as not being a scientist and am curious. It's great that we can go anywhere that's locked away and hidden, but should we?

The moon was "locked away" but we went there, didn't we?

Everyone needs to relax, there's an expedition to explore Lake Ellsworth and we've already explored an ultra-oligotrophic lake named Hodgson Lake [nerc.ac.uk] and the results:

They found... nothing. The analyses show that the Hodgson Lake water 'is one of the clearest water lakes I have ever worked on, clearer than the distilled water we use in our lab, with almost nothing in it,' says Hodgson. The samples have virtually no nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and very low measurements of other chemical elements.

So they're going to take necessary precautions approved by a governing body and the odds are high that their results will just turn up some of the purest water we've ever seen. Of course the article notes that if they find extremophiles, it'll be a boon for studying the many protective enzymes the organisms need to live.

It wouldn't effect the world at large. The lake would be forever changed however.

Do note that they are not opening it to the air. They are going to poke it, let the pressure differential push some of the lakewater out the bore a ways and plug it.... which will cause the released water to freeze and plug the lake. Later, they can drill back down and take a hunk of the frozen water without re-opening the lake itself, and do their sciency stuff with that.